WSJ: Instead of diverting more water for California drought, Obama blames climate change

President Obama took a break from his California golf and diplomatic sojourn late last week to visit the land liberals forgot—the parched Central Valley. Democrats must have told the President he needed to show some concern over the state's record drought, and so naturally Mr. Obama devoted about a third of his remarks to a lecture on global warming.

"We have to be clear: A changing climate means that weather-related disasters like droughts, wildfires, storms, floods are potentially going to be costlier and they're going to be harsher," the President said visiting a farm in Los Banos. "Droughts have obviously been a part of life out here in the West since before any of us were around and water politics in California have always been complicated, but scientific evidence shows that a changing climate is going to make them more intense."

In fact, there is no scientific consensus that climate change will make California drier, much less that it is the cause of this year's drought. Even the New York Times felt obliged to point that out after Mr. Obama's remarks.

But for environmentalists and many Democrats, climate change has become the all-purpose explanation. In California it helps to divert attention from the fact that state and federal policies favor endangered fish over farmers and retard water projects that would make the Central Valley better able to survive dry years. House Republicans have passed a bill to ease these obstacles, but Mr. Obama is threatening a veto and didn't even invite Fresno County's GOP Congressman Devin Nunes to the event.

Mr. Obama announced that the feds will write $135 million in checks to the region, but what farmers really need is to get the fair-share of water they'd get if it weren't diverted to help the delta smelt.

3 comments:

In UK also same thing is happening. Instead of accepting their fault, rulers are just blaming climate change for the flood. It means climate change is a blessing in disguise for non-doers who almost all the leaders of world are.

Even NASA disagrees with the President's science assessment that it's "changing climate" (by which I think he means AGW, since climate has been and always will be changing) in one of their latest releases here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5HwRXsw2Q8

In their closing statements they are clear and precise that the science shows the drought is natural variability that has been seen many times in the past. But then they can't help themselves and have a final sentence that tries to weasel in "Climate Change" to the science statement by saying, "ultimately climate change _COULD_ make western droughts worse."